By Drew Stuart
Published August 18, 2022 at 6:45 AM CDT
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https://tinyurl.com/yjd6f5ab
photograph by Christopher Hillen. Less than 200 miles southwest of El Paso, Paquime, or Casas Grandes, is the largest city center known from the prehistoric North American deserts. Thousands lived here in multi-story adobe apartments, marshaling the waters of nearby rivers and springs in an urban oasis.
“There are many houses of great size, strength and height,” the Spanish chronicler Baltasar Obregon wrote in the 1560s. “They are six and seven stories, with towers and walls like fortresses.” “The houses contain large and magnificent patios paved with enormous and beautiful stones,” he wrote, with “walls whitewashed and painted in many colors and shades with pictures.”
This was Casas Grandes, or Paquime. Thousands lived in this desert city only a century before the Spanish arrived. A three-and-a-half-hour drive from El Paso, 250 miles due west of Marfa, Paquime is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. To visit this site in Chihuahua, Mexico is thrilling. Here, the region's prehistoric people built a thriving city – rooted in ancient desert traditions, and connected to cultures far afield.
Located near the modern city of Nuevo Casas Grandes, Paquime is surrounded by Chihuahuan Desert grasslands and volcanic hills and mountains. Paquime and Marfa are at almost precisely the same elevation, and a West Texas visitor could easily imagine they were on the Marfa Plateau, at the foothills of the Davis Mountains.
But there's an important difference. The great range of the Sierra Madre Occidental rises just 25 miles west of Paquime. Flowing from the mountains, two perennial streams join here to form the Casas Grandes River. The people of Paquime were able to marshal these waters, as well as those of a prolific nearby spring, for an urban oasis. There were reservoirs and canals to convey drinking water, as well as fields of corn, beans, squash and other crops.
More:
https://www.marfapublicradio.org/show/nature-notes/2022-08-18/visiting-paquime-the-ancient-water-city-of-the-chihuahuan-desert
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